The rampant investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and the resources required to support this wave has long raised discussions about the risks of a capital market bubble. However, this debate is beginning to extend to other areas.
This is the central theme of a new report by Apollo Global Management , highlighted by the British newspaper Financial Times . According to the asset manager, big tech companies are on track to dominate the US bond market , "stealing" the leadership from large banks and telecommunications companies.
In numbers, Apollo Global Management projects that, by 2030, half of the top 10 borrowers in the country's corporate bond market will be hyperscale companies – companies like AWS, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
These companies are known as such because they operate large technology infrastructures designed to scale rapidly and support a massive volume of services and applications, which directly addresses the increasingly pressing demands of artificial intelligence.
"What appears diversified across issuers and sectors increasingly represents a single macro operation in artificial intelligence," Apollo analysts highlighted in the report, which presents the asset manager's credit outlook for 2026.
Other data reinforces this trend. Morgan Stanley estimates that hyperscale companies and their related businesses will raise $400 billion in the U.S. high-quality bond market in 2026, compared to $170 billion last year and $44 billion in 2024.
JP Morgan notes that sectors related to artificial intelligence and data centers now represent 14.5% of the JPMorgan US Liquid Index – a benchmark index for the US investment-grade bond market – a share already larger than that held by banks.
Although it only started monitoring the sector last year, the American bank highlights that the segment is growing rapidly and predicts that it could represent more than a fifth of the index by 2030.
Given this scenario, Lauren Wagandt, portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, told the Financial Times that the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence led by hyperscale companies could increase volatility in the high-quality bond market, which until now was more stable.
“This is probably a bad thing if we become more correlated with equities and less diversified than in the past,” Wagandt said. The fact is that the increase in AI-related bond issuance has already raised credit costs for the most indebted companies.
Oracle's credit spread, for example, rose more than 0.75 percentage points after the company raised $18 billion in the bond market in September 2025, according to data from S&P Global.
“If (hyperscale companies) have to raise $10 billion every quarter for the rest of the year, how will the market react?” asked Dominique Toublan, head of US credit strategy at Barclays, to the British newspaper.
However, some offer a counterpoint in this context. Nathaniel Rosenbaum, strategist for the US high-grade credit team at JP Morgan, said that the strong credit ratings of hyperscale banks made the increase in issuance "a net positive for ratings in the investment-grade universe."
John Loyd, global head of multi-sector credit at Janus Henderson Investors, noted that companies with large cash reserves, such as Alphabet and Meta, still have considerable room to expand their lending without harming their credit ratings.
“If artificial intelligence explodes, it will be bad for their net worth, but their credit will likely still be very solid,” Loyd added.
